The Land of Keith Plums

Read from Wednesday, January 12th to Monday, January 17th.

The Land of Green Plums, by Herta Muller.  I first heard about this book recently after I saw that it won the 2009 Nobel prize for literature, even though the book was first written in the early 1990's.  It is a haunting book, apparently close to an autobiography, of a young woman and her friends stuck in Romania during Communist rule under the dictator Ceausescu (I can never pronounce that name).  Reading almost like poetry, and without any traditional chapters or sequential flow of time, this was a great book, and I am glad I took a chance on it.

The narrator, unnamed in the book but can be seen as Herta Muller, starts off by describing Lola, her roommate at college.  She slept around with strangers, and then ultimately killed herself when one of them rejected her.  After Lola's death, the narrator bonds with three male classmates, Georg, Kurt and Edgar.  They all have German heritage, and that makes them subversives in the eyes of the dictatorship and the secret police.  They collect books and poems and keep them hidden, but eventually they fall under the scrutiny of Captain Pjele, of the secret police.  He questions them constantly, terrorizes them, and eventually gets them fired from their jobs after college.  They all try to emigrate to Germany, but Pjele makes it a bureaucratic nightmare for them, and continues to track them after they have left.  Only Edgar and the narrator survive, Georg and Kurt both mysteriously kill themselves.

More than the plot itself, the book is about life in that communist dictatorship.  It is about the emotions of feeling trapped, the helplessness, the mindless hordes of the proletariat.  It abounds with symbols and metaphors, such as the wooden melons and tin sheep (for the industrialization of agriculture and rural life, and the complete state control of that system), the chicken torture, her hair, her belts (Lola's suicide), seamstresses, dogs, the blood guzzling accomplices, back-pain, and most notably the green plums, which the guards and police devoured constantly, even though they were not ripe and were dangerous.  They represent the complete corruption and greed of the state, that has infiltrated all aspects of the society.  Every resident is affected, whether they bend and become accomplices and informers, or they break and become a casualty of the state.  This is a beautiful, haunting poem with such rich language that it deserves to be read out loud.  Highly recommended, five out of five stars.